LIBRARY UNiVERSI-Pf OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 177 THE PURSUIT OF REASON CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS ionton: FETTER LANE, E.G. C. F. CLAY, Manager CtiinfaurBb : loo, PRINCES STREET JStrlin: A. ASHER AND CO. leipjis: F. A. BROCKHAUS Beia lork: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS Bombag antj Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd. AU rights reserved THE PURSUIT OF REASON BY CHARLES FRANCIS KEARY, M.A. Cambridge : at the University Press 1910 * Itaque jam de spe dicendum est ; praesertim cum nos promissores non simus, nee vim aut insidias hominum judiciis faciamus aut struamus, sed homines manu et sponte ducamus.' — Bacon, Nov. Org. Aph. 92. ' I am now therefore to speak touching Hope ; especially as I am not a dealer in promises, and wish neither to force nor to ensnare men's judgments, but to lead them by the hand with their good wiW— Trans, by Spedding and Ellis. PREFACE AT a famous trial, Whistler the painter proclaimed that a ■^-^ picture must be reckoned as the outcome, not of so many days' labour, but of ' the education of a lifetime.' In the same order of ideas I may call this Treatise on Reason the labour of a lifetime : for I cannot easily remember the time when I was not interested in one or other of the questions with which it is concerned. This is said only for the sake of anyone who may know work of the author in other fields. I believe that the second and third chapters of my First Book constitute something like a 'system.' And it will be found upon reflection that most of the chapters that follow and almost all the practical conclusions of the Second Book do in fact rest upon those two chapters as their logical basis. Nevertheless this ' Pursuit of Reason ' is not offered as a system ; but first of all as a pure exercise of the faculty of reasoning. As I have said again elsewhere, it is addressed first of all to those (though few) to whom the act of reasoning appears both as a pleasure and a duty. And by reasoning I understand something different from mere controversial argument. In its present form this treatise was written in the winter of 1908 — 9. Except in one instance (where the late King is referred to), I have not endeavoured by the addition of a phrase or a note here and there to bring it up to date, nor to cite works which have appeared or that I have read since the vi PREFACE tiiiu' I spoak of. Such changes might have given a false impression. Following the analogy of mathematics, but de- parting somewhat from Kant's use, I have described Book i. !is devoted to ' pure ' reason, the employment of reason in and by itself. But Book ii. is given up to reason 'applied' to controverted questions of the day. My thanks are due to four friends, Mr J. Ellis McTaggart, Mr Stanley Lane-Poole, Mr E. R. Bevan and Mr John Buchan, who have read this volume in ' copy ' or in proof and have helped the author by various suggestions and criticisms, but of whom none is in any way responsible for the volume's content. C. F. K. September 1910. CONTENTS BOOK I PURE REASON CHAPTER I. Reason .... II. Thought and Speech III. Reality .... IV. ASSENTISM AND PRAGMATISM v. Reasoning in Science VI. The Current Philosophy of Science VII. Anthropology and Psychology VIII. The New Obscurantism and the New Learning PAGE 3 34 62 79 97 126 145 169 I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XL XII. XIII. BOOK II APPLIED REASON Theology 19^ The Supernatural 216 God and the Gods 243 The god of Metaphysics 271 Immortality 284 Perfectibility and Providence .... 294 The Church 299 The Church {continued) 325 The State 342 Society 368 Public Economy 387 The creative Imagination 409 Conclusion 443 Index ^^^ BOOK I. PURE REASON. K. R. CHAPTER I. REASON. I WILL not begin this book by any rhetorical praise of Reason, nor even by urging the advantages of its pursuit, as a man might do, pointing out how he who follows reason shutting out passion must often find himself able to hold the scales between two heated opponents, and thus play the part of a lesser Zeus here on earth. On one account I will not try to do this, because almost every one now-a-days professes to be reasonable and to be ready to hear reason and use it. The time when men could glory in the paradox. Est impossibile ? Certum est has gone by. But on another account I will not do it, because in reality the pursuit of reason is by no means an affair of the intellect alone; the conscience has a good deal to do with it also. Among all our intellectual possessions reason is nearest allied to the love of justice. The capacity for following a line of argument is not alone enough for the pursuit of reason. That is indeed its first condition; and we may say that those who are born without that power are born not alone without the sense of reason but without a natural sense of justice, though they may be other- wise morally and intellectually endowed. Yet to be good at an argument is not to love reason. You will find plenty of folk — among barristers for instance and those who, whatever their profession, are born advocates — who have this natural faculty of pursuing an argument pretty well developed : only they cannot use it except for advocacy. When there is no question of pleading upon some particular side their intellects go to sleep. Advocacy has become a part of their nature. Give them a subject which is free of all incitement to passion and their minds will merely 1—2 4 THE PURSUIT OF REASON not act. We have in our wisdom decided that the practice of pleading — what is commonly called special pleading — is the best means to the acquirement of a judicial mind upon the bench. In law it may be so ; but it is not so in everyday life : on the contrary, a very little practice in this habit of always taking sides may be enough to prevent a man all his life long from really cherishing right reason. Upon the other hand what seems the opposite of this habit of advocacy is not all-sufficient either — I mean that a man should be engaged the most part of his time upon investi- gations in which heat or passion is scarcely possible, such as scientific ones. Scientific pursuits, though among the best of preparations towards acquiring a reasonable mind, even they do not themselves give it. For no exactness with scales or with the microscope will endow us with the moral element in reason, the sense of justice: and for him who is without it, it may happen that, through mere repression, whenever an opportunity for advocacy does present itself, he will show a more heated partisan than the one whose profession is advocacy. Moreover, as we shall come to see hereafter, there are some special disabilities besides its many advantages, which attend the scientific training, face to face with the following of reason. We shall see in a future chapter that there are some processes of reason which can only be carried on by the aid of the imagination — nay, of a special order of imagination — which the training of science does not foster. Thus, though the man of science is in a better posture forjudging things reasonably than is the advocate, the journalist, the pamphleteer, the hustings speaker, he is not by his training alone ensured against error. We may conclude then, that no patent system exists, no royal road for becoming reasonable, a votary of right reason; and that the most people who are this have the seeds of it born in them. Such folk compose the only sort I have any hope of interesting throughout the length and breadth of this treatise. The rest will, I doubt, look on ahead, skipping the First Book, till in the Second they come to more polemical questions. If they find the author agreeing with them (in the main) upon these, they will pay attention just to those arguments of his which will tend to enforce the opinions they have determined REASON 5 to hold. And if (alas !) the author seems in any way heretical to these fixed and received opinions of theirs, they will most likely hardly wait to see what he has to say for his own. But the small remainder of folk, naturally lovers of reason, will for us and our purposes constitute a fit audience though few. Reason would not of course be an affair of ethics if it were not nine times out of ten passion and self-interest which turned men away from the pursuit of it. It need not be so — in the nature of things. Men might simply say deteriora sequor, and go their own way. But they do in fact always persuade them- selves that the course they are determined to pursue, the opinions they are fixed to hold, are the right ones. This seems imposed upon us by our very nature ; but the process of self- deception is besides very convenient to our objects. We could hardly get our way unless we persuaded a good many other folks to think as we do : but the first step toward persuading other people is to be ourselves convinced that we are in the right. Yet despite all influences tending another way, the essential wonder of human nature is not its lapses into advocacy, but the degree to which man is at bottom a reasoning animal, how very early the power of reasoning, of drawing conclusions by reflec- tion, manifests itself in him not crudely, but in almost a perfect form. I am myself almost sure — though I know anthropologists are apt to maintain the contrary — that quite small children reason and even reason profoundly. We have at all events evidence of childrens' capabilities in reasoning so soon as they begin upon Euclid, upon Geometry : and that I imagine in the better sort of schools is usually at eleven or twelve. For there is no reasoning more abstract and more perfect as such than the geometrician's. For evidence (convincing only to himself) each one is obliged to draw on individual experience, and to speak in a manner egoistically. Speaking in this way, I can in my own case fix to the age of not more than twelve the time when I got most pleasure and a very decided pleasure from Euclid : and I take the individual instance because it is of a mind having no mathematical bias, no natural facility in thinking in figures or numbers, which the born mathematician 6 THE PURSUIT OF REASON possesses. I am sure too that among my own class-fellows those who could not follow the reasoning of the geometrician were in a decided minority ; I know this, because I know that the one or two such were sought out and discovered and punished; very unjustly punished for an invincible natural incapacity. Among grown-up men and women you will find a certain number, clever enough in other ways, who are merely incapable of abstract reasoning : such will be represented in any class or form. But both among boys and grown-up folk they are in a visible minority. That it is difficult to fix boys' attention upon something which seems so unpractical as Euclid: that is natural enough. Have they not a hundred more im- portant things to occupy their minds— their sports and games, their internal policies, their hero-worships, their friendships and enmities, battles and comradeships ? But if you can once con- centrate the attention of a boy upon this abstract and exact reasoning, I am sure he not only understands the bent of it but takes a pleasure in understanding. One childhood proof of this in my own case I will here set down, for the effect of it is very clear in memory. 'Tis known that children personify almost everything, and take individual likes and dislikes for certain rooms, certain chairs or forms, nay, for certain numerals even or letters of the Greek alphabet. Well, in my mind there still lingers this sort of personal resentment against the fourth proposition of the first book of Euclid. The very figure with the bulging base to one of the triangles displeased me and by recollection displeases me still. This was certainly because in that proposition the reasoning must seem to almost any mind less complete and satisfying (as a boy would express it less ' fair ') than in any proposition which precedes and in most that follow. This proposition seems — at least — to arrive at its result rather by individual experiment than by general reasoiiing. The eighth proposition does much the same : but no doubt the vials of my wrath had been expended on the fourth, so that the same sense of resentment does not remain in my mind touching the later theorem. This is a difference which I am sure anyone would notice who had a mind at all naturally attuned to the following of reason : and I guess that most boys who ' do ' their Euclid for REASON 7 the first time feel much the same ; though the feeling may not personify itself as much as with me it did, and they may not afterwards remember it so well. Yet this sentiment is im- portant evidence of the capacity for abstract reason in children — in the actual case mentioned a child in fact not twelve, probably not more than eleven ; seeing that the distinction between (say) the reasoning in Euclid's third and fourth proposition is in effect the distinction twixt ' reason ' and ' experiment,' in other words it is the distinction twixt ' Reason ' (Vernunft) and ' Understanding ' (Verstand) which we thank Kant for having made manifest to the world. This difference then that hath made clear the First among those that reason, even a child is capable of ignorantly recognising. This is enough to show that all the germs of right reason exist already in a childish mind. 'Tis rather power of expression than the essence of the thing which is lacking. As much as the act of learning (acquiring knowledge), I am sure that the act of reasoning gives a natural pleasure to all — ' not only to philosophers,' as Aristotle says of learning. This is something upon which we can build, can build at least many hopes, and which it is wise to keep in our thoughts — that is for him whosoever he be who in his maturity takes delight in reasoning for its own sake, and holds the exercise of this faculty both a pleasure and a duty : the fact that evidently the capacity therefor is very natural to man, very early im- planted in the minds even of children. Maybe (as Wordsworth sings) ' to perish never,' 'Which neither listlessness nor mad endeavour Can utterly abolish or destroy.' Although (for this alas ! is certain also) very soon come in a variety of forces — ' listlessness and mad endeavour ' and many another, which seem bent on destroying or abolishing our faculty of reason. There comes in first of all utility or utilitarianism : that begins to work even in childhood. Very early now-a-days boys are set to cramming for examinations : and for success in examinations memory is of the mental faculties the most important, reason — all things considered — perhaps the least useful : which is indeed most unlucky, seeing that memory is 8 THE PURSUIT OF REASON eertainl}' the lowest and reason the highest (or of the highest) among the powers of the mind'. Then again— closely allied to this first influence —there is throughout the world just at this moment an inherited suspicion of the faculty of pure reason, which is supposed to be first cousin to scholastics and so not far remote from obscurantism. It seems a curious contradiction in things that reason, which of all the faculties of the mind one would reckon the most unfriendly to obscurantism, should have got as it were— tarred with the brush of obscurantism ; and that the very folk who profess to be the devoted servants of enlightenment and who willingly assume the name of rationa- lists, lovers of reason, should many of them at bottom entertain a certain suspicion of reason. But life is full of paradoxes of this sort ; and there is a historical if not a logical justification for the sentiment. For popular belief, the merit of science consists not alone in that it is a training for thought : but that (as George Eliot's Mr Brooke would say) it does not carry ' that sort of thing ' too far. Metaphysics, for the general, falls under the same ban as scholasticism : it is either a means of obscu- rantism or reckoned a mere waste of time, at best an esoteric pleasure comparable to chess-playing, a fellow of no mark or likelihood. A great part of this is I know mere popular prejudice, if with any justification with an historical one only, and supported by ignorance — ignorance for example that mathe- matics should more rightly be reckoned a branch of metaphysics than of ' science.' Yet a residuum of truth remains. By the very means and on account of the prejudice against 'philosophy,' metaphysics have been too much forced into a cave which is something like a scholastic cell. It is not reasonable to be always reasoning on the foundations of knowledge, or to be sharpening the wits perpetually on the grindstone of some one 1 It will be said against me that mathematics does as a fact take an impor- tant place in most examinations. But I submit— though I speak in this matter neither as a mathematician nor an educationalist— that the kind of mathema- tical gifts which make for success in examinations are not the most reasoning kind: that they depend on a certain capability of 'thinking in numbers' which is more allied to memory than it is to the logical faculty. And secondly, I urge that the extent to which (since Descartes' day) algebra has ousted geometry from the field of mathematics has much lessened the value of the higher mathe- matics as a training for the reason. REASON 9 among the paradoxes of life. The fact that philosophy, as men prefer to call it to-day, is a kind of academic pursuit, hedged round with an immense technical vocabulary ; this is both a cause and a result of popular suspicion of ' reason ' as a com- panion for everyday life. But of all the influences which make for a certain decay in the reasoning faculties as men advance from childhood to maturity, the strongest without question is polemics — theo- logical polemics first, political next ensuing. Boys understand polemics in a more simple fashion. They are Tories or Liberals, even Socialists maybe to-day. But they settle their disputes with fists and pillow-cases : and that method leaves their capacities for abstract reasoning untouched. Grown men so very early take delight in advocacy, so very early they limit their reading to the journals, books, reviews of their own party, that it would ask almost a miraculous intervention if their minds were to retain a discrimination for unbiased reason. The best that can happen to them is what we hope for those who have accustomed themselves to unwholesome diet, that their stomachs may revolt at last. And surely if there should ever come a craving after something simpler than our latter-day polemics, the time for it is now. I will ask no better proof of how far we are almost all of us gone from the ensuit of reason than this — that I am sure the utmost point the average justly-inclined man would go to in the direction of impartiality, would be to speak after this fashion. ' I hold,' he would say, ' such and such opinions. Now, as I am a just man and fear Reason, I will give you who think the opposite a patient hearing: and if you can prove to me, demonstrate to me that I am in error, I will change to your views.' Not many, not any but a very few go in practice so far as this : none but a very few do in fact read anything or any serious amount of what is to be said in contradiction of their views — let alone giving it a patient hearing. And yet a love of right reason will require us to go much further than even our supposed just man will go. ' Proof,' ' demonstration ' — these are very difficult things. In the ordinary, the indifferent affairs of life we content ourselves with inuch less than demonstration. We content ourselves and have to be content with the balance 10 THE PURSUIT OF REASON of probabilities : and then we act reasonably, because in the ordinary afifairs of life no passion distorts our judgment. In controverted matters also, if we reckoned right reason among the necessities of life, we should be content not alone with demonstration, but failing that, with the balance of probabilities likewise. The balance of probabilities, in short, is the truth. For who has endowed us with knowledge of any further truth ? The balance of probabilities whether there be or be not ghosts ; whether Tariff Reform will produce this or that result predicted; whether the Virgin Birth of Jesus be a fact or a legend : this balance would determine our decision in any case. The passion which a question excites in us cannot alter the facts about that question. It is as much certain that there must either be or not be ghosts, either be or not be the Supernatural taken as a w^hole if you prefer that instance, as it is certain that a given egg must be new-laid or not new-laid. A love of reason demands of us that we should always be ready to conform to the balance of probabilities so far as we have time to learn them : that we should so far as is practicable keep our minds open to fresh information that may change the balance. And to do this is much more possible than the average man supposes. Not indeed if we begin with the notion that the exercise of reason and the choice between two opinions is a disagreeable process, to be avoided as much as possible, to be got over once maybe and then abandoned. Then indeed this alert and attentive posture of the mind would be impracticable. But this book is written upon an opposite theory. I do not know any way in which a man may be better prepared to follow reason, to judge of life reasonably, than by reminding himself constantly, with painful iteration if need be, that every proposition — every single proposition — must be either true or false : that if a thing is not true it is false, and if it is not false it is true. This at any rate is true of all those questions about which men wax hot in controversy ; to settle them folk do not need to enter those transcendental regions in which every statement is shown to be true and false. Such a single proposition would be ' There are no ghosts,' provided there were no ambiguity in the term. ' The supernatural REASON 11 exists,' that too would be a single proposition on the same conditions : but here ambiguity of terms would certainly enter. This of course is not saying that in any single proposition — those two or any other — we possess the necessary data to come to a final conclusion. And though we recognise that there must exist thousands of simple propositions which for want of data we cannot decide, it is at least something to remind our- selves that there is a true and a false in relation to each of these. And then again to each individual thinker applies the rule which we gave above about the balance of probabilities. Each one must decide for himself according to that balance — giving of course due weight to authority whenever it is a technical matter. The probability is (in the case of authority) that the specialist, if he be a specialist and have no temptation to distort the truth, is to be trusted. Whoso is a lover of knowledge ought to understand this. Nothing can alter the balance of piobabilities on any question, not bluff, nor advocacy, nor quibbling with words, nor verbal triumphs, nor wit, nor the making one's opposer look like a fool. No effect is produced by any of these things upon the balance of probability, which lies in the scales of Zeus. In what way can it change the balance of probability to say that every schoolboy knows this or that, when you know that every schoolboy does not know it ? Or that every sane man has come to such and such an opinion, when you know that there are plenty not holding that opinion who are not insane ? If this is so or was so then you can show it, or at least put your reader on the track of finding it out : and in that case what every schoolboy knows or does not know is without consequence. And if even many sane men think with you upon such a matter, there must be argument therefor expressible in few words. But on the other hand, to keep our judgment in suspense merely because we do not choose to think and on the plea that ' we shall never know,' this is a mere indolence. ' We shall never know ' maybe what is the true constitution of matter: but anyone who chooses to think clearly knows what matter signifies to him in the common affairs of life : and if he be a man of science he knows what matter signifies in ' the common aftairs ' of science. To say that we shall never know the true constitution of matter 12 THE PURSUIT OF REASON means in reality that we shall never know the ultimate cause of that impression upon us which we call mattei*. This is really quite a different question from the enquiry what matter is : for matter is that which experientially or scientifically we know it to be, or even what the balance of probabilities gained from science and experience tells us that it is. And when you shall hear a person say ' I make no distinction between matter and mind,' you may know him not for a profound metaphysician, only for a man who has lost the faculty of clear thought. Next after the need for continually reminding ourselves that every (single) proposition must be either true or false, should come, I doubt, for such as would think clearly and so follow reason, the habit of separating what we may call 'questions' into the various propositions of which the 'questions' are composed. This will be of special use to us when we are in the department of ' applied reason.' For ' pure reason,' it has less significance. It is precisely this that in polemics we never do nor try to do : so that in these polemics we really do continually run round and round like squirrels in a cage or a puppy pursuing his own tail. Each party in every controverted question delivers telling blows against what to their opposers is an irrelevant side issue, and the combatants hardly ever close upon one essential theorem. Yet science has existed in vain if it has not taught us this ground principle, that one way at least whereby a thing may be tried by reason is by separating it into its elements : when a vague moticm is resolved into a series of movements in different directions, partly nullifying each other, and each under the impulse of a separate force ; when complex bodies have been resolved into their chemical constituents; by these means a comparison of and a classifi- cation of the bodies in the universe have become possible. So ought we to proceed in argument, in dealing with all com- plicated ' questions,' more especially with such as provoke polemics : we ought so to act whenever possible. And it is to be hoped that the course of this treatise, that is in the Second Book, will show how often such a method is possible. I make no promise of large results ; for the questions which give rise to polemics are mostly not only complicated in their nature, but have been complicated infinitely more by controversy. But if REASON 13 we should settle one or two by this means ; nay, if we but come within sight of the possibility of their being settled, that will be something ; that will be a real good, a thousand times more worth than the everlasting din, the eternal hammer and tongs of advocacy and polemic. Nor shall we in the end increase our labour, though at the first blush it might seem that we should do so, by dividing 'questions' up into their constituent single propositions. Reckoning backwards and seeing how our forebears increase in geometrical progression, we might conceive it impossible that at the same time we were approximating to a primal pair. The difficulty in the present case is not less deceptive. If what seems a single proposition splits through our process into many, yet these many recur again and again in questions which seem diverse. At first blush it might seem simpler to take the motion of (say) the moon as we find it, instead of dividing that motion into constituent parts due to initial velocity, to the attractions of the earth and of the sun. At first blush it would undoubtedly seem simpler to study bodies as they are, and that we only doubled our labour by analysing them into salts, metals, or what not. But for a certain kind of reasoning about bodies this has proved the better way. And in those compound problems that are all polemical ones it is the same ; about half the questions over which we dispute for ever and spend ourselves in vain are but different combi- nations of much more simple ones. Into this fact we shall at least get some insight before we have done. Another reader, however, will say, ' There is nothing new in this : all these principles of right reason have I followed fi-om my youth up.' I shall be glad to think and often flatter my hopes by thinking that there are many such : that the form which all polemic questions take in books of controversy, in the press and so on, is a condition much more crude than, and a great way behind, the form they take in many individual minds ; that the better sort of reasonable folk have maybe settled them for themselves and settled them in an unbiased, unimpassioned way ; but they give Heaven thanks, and make no boast of it. This, however, is certain, that it is a characteristic of the 14 THE PURSUIT OF REASON greater number of people cast in this reasonable mould, of such as do not take their opinions ready made nor esteem it a waste of time to keep their reasoning faculties in use, that upon the whole they prefer to shut themselves within the four walls of what is strictly called philosophy. They do not, I suspect, trust themselves to reason so calmly upon polemic subjects as over metaphysical ones. A man who will see all that can be said on both sides of the question, whether or no we can imagine matter infinitely divisible, will not be so reasonable when the subject is of the existence of the Supernatural, the existence of God. And the evil of reserving all really calm, unimpassioned argument for the rare atmosphere of meta- physics lies not so much (as the general think) in the fact that these questions are unpractical; but it lies in the tendency it fosters to treat reason much as the Protestant — he especially — treats religion ; that is, as a Sunday matter and not to be carried about for everyday use. We cannot do away vnth the paradoxes of life : and the greater part of pure metaphysic or academic philosophy re- solves itself into an attempt to do this. It is among the paradoxes of life — an unkind stroke which seems to come straight from the gods themselves — that while man has been created essentially a reasoning animal, his reason followed conscientiously always brings him at the last face to face with a blank wall. He is for ever through his metaphysics trying to climb the wall, for ever falling back just as he thinks he has touched the summit. That these things should be is, I say, itself a paradox : and each of the blank walls our reason reaches is another among the paradoxes of life, before which the wise man can only bow his head. It is because of them that the vulgar make a mock of Reason and profane the name of the goddess ;. and it is no wonder that her votaries should in the past have used almost superhuman efforts to overtop the impassable barriers, in order that Reason might be justified of her children. They have shown at least that there is no better exercise for the mind than the speculations they have given themselves up to. But that is not enough to satisfy the public, who demand positive results. And it REASON 15 may be said for certain that no book on pure philosophy has directly done much to make men reasonable, to attract the world at large to the ways of clear thinking. Those whom the metaphysicians have convinced of the value of metaphysic were convinced already. Of late years 'philosophy' has become more and more a cabinet affair, a matter of Byzantine learning : in despair of attracting it now repels the vulgus, repels it (as has already been said) by an immense technical vocabulaiy. Science too shrouds itself in a technical vocabulary and has its inner mysteries, which it wishes to presence untouched. But then science can always perform \dsible miracles outside the temple ; that is amply enough to keep aKve the faith of the people. Metaphysics can do no such thing: it can onh' show a front of wisdom or deal in oracular sayings: for these the public has no credence left. I hold it, then, better for my present purpose merely to recognise the existence of these paradoxes of life ; not trying to minimise them, but not staying for ever in one more attempt to explain and do away with them. The contradictions of things are indeed very numerous and meet us at every turn. They are expressed in proverbs. Corruptio optinii pessima — what could be more paradoxical than that ? 'Tis a paradox that the sun should seem to travel round the earth, a paradox which has deceived countless generations of men. Our selves are an eternal paradox to ourselves, i.e. that knowledge should be at once both inside of ourselves and outside of ourselves. The beginning of all metaphysic is this paradox. Some paradoxes are explicable, some may become so. But there are a number against which human thought has beaten and broken itself since man began to philosophise. I will choose out of these paradoxes of life one only. But I will take the first and greatest of all — the paradox of paradoxes, the antinomy of antinomies, the dispute betwixt Determinism and the doctrine of Free Will. You can prove the position of Deter- minism by unanswerable arguments — that we cannot even imagine an action uncaused, an effect without a cause : and cause in this case means eflScient cause (it always does in fact) ; so that every action and every thought must be deter- mined by some previous actions and thoughts, efficiently and 16 THE PURSUIT OF REASON completely determined, and Free Will can be but an illusion of the mind. You can reason thus: you can prove your position thus. But in the very act of so reasoning and so proving your position you have already assumed Free Will, you have assumed that ' choice ' is not an appearance but a reality : that the mind was free to choose between two alternatives, for only on such an assumption can Reason have any meaning. And just as impossible as it is for us logically to conceive of an undetermined action, even so is it impossible for us actually to conceive of all our thoughts and actions pre- determined and all choice or alternative ruled out of existence. There, I believe, we stand and shall stand upon this question of Free Will and Determinism, with arguments exactly balanced and mutually destructive. To most folk according to their education or habits of thought one set of arguments, one course of reasoning on this matter, will seem to have substance, the other to be shadowy, endowed with the appearance of logic not the reality. But this choice will be a personal idiosyncrasy not inherent in either course of reason. Nor, so it seems to me, could he who was the most thoughtful of mankind in two long treatises ever get effectively beyond this dilemma. Though Kant propounded three problems for solution at the outset of his Kritik — God, Free Will, Immortality — the middle one is so much the hardest that the essential success or failure of the Criticism depended on the solution which Kank found for that. He found no solution ; and the Kritik der prak- tiscken Vernunft came in to supply the other side of the argument which ' pure reason,' mere Logic, must leave un- settled or must decide for Determinism. The outcome of Kant's second Kritik is not (as some mistakenly interpret it) that we are practically bound to ignore what our reason has yet determined in one sense ; but that our practical, or as some would say our dynamic, reason points to one con- clusion, while our so-called pure or static reason points to a different conclusion. This brings us out at the same point that has been stated above : either decision for or against Free Will is a gift — a datum — of reason ; but reason itself can answer the same question in two opposite senses. I confess that such an unanswered paradox as this and as REASON 17 fifty others of like kind with which metaphysics is concerned — hoiu knowledge is possible ; how we can have an idea of infinity : liow we can know the existence of the unknown — all such give occasion for blasphemy to the enemies of Reason. Why (say they) serve a goddess who rewards service so ill ? For the votary of reason there remains little else but to bow his head in silence. I know that in turning our backs upon pure metaphysic — pure philosophy — we must give up therewith the attempt or the pretence to solve all the riddles of existence. Such a task is undertaken lightly by practical men who have (say) just heard of evolution, or by men hitherto immersed in science who take a sudden fancy for speculation. They are protected by their ignorance. Whosoever has broken his head, as one may say, and almost his heart in reasoning about the Absolute, about Reality, about those regions of pure thought in which a proposition and its contrary may both be in a manner true, or both in a manner false, he at least is saved from such presumption by sad experience. He has seen the greatest (at least among the moderns) among those who reason, like another Penelope, undoing with one book half the skein which was woven in an earlier book. He has beheld the first among those that see brought (seemingly) to deny the most elementary law of right reason — the Principle of Contradiction, as it is called. He is obliged, as I have said, to resign himself to behold these things. But for a treatise which sets forth with the purpose of pursuing reason, but not all the paradoxes of life, the way is clearer, the rule of the road more simple. For every force there is a medium in which it reaches its highest power, and that medium lies between extremes. The fish that could not swim in mud, could not swim in air neither, even if he could live in air; nor could a bird fiy in water nor in a too rarefied atmosphere. And, though up to a certain point if you diminish the section of your wire, the electric current gains in power, there is a limit to that likewise. Now transcendental meta- physics is, I hold, a current of reason which men try and force along too fine a wire. For the wire is human speech. We shall in the following chapter give attention to this matter, 18 THE PURSUIT OF REASON the limitations of thought and its expression through speech, though not in such wise as to touch the higher metaphysics. Lack of enough words is a kind of physical disability which, as I think, the metaphysicians never allowed for. If many of our English metaphysicians but took account as individuals of the fact that they really think in German rather than in English, they would understand how the current of their thoughts cannot pass surely from their minds to any others. In any case, these matters lie outside the purpose of this treatise, even of our first part. That is not a philosophy of life, but rather a philosophy of reason. One that it is hoped may justify itself in the second portion, should we find how much simpler than we suppose is the solution of many con- troverted questions. §2. I am sure that at this moment of time, as compared to the last generation or the last two, we are in a state of decline in reasonableness, in our use of reason. We have learned a certain tolerance and modus vivendi ; and that might be urged in contradiction to what has just been said. But that would only be by a use of ' reasonableness ' in quite a different sense from my use of it here. This kind of reasonableness is con- sistent with complete non-intellectuality. It argues no exer- cise of the brain to decide that one's opinions are not worth quarrelling about. Non-intellectuality is, as most people will agree, a note of our time ; a thing very visible in the books and plays and pictures that are popular. Though it is only fair to remember that a vast deal of brute matter has been incorporated into what pass for the educated classes ; and we may hope that intellectuality is somewhere at work leavening the mass. For the moment in all visible ways reason has suffered with our disintellectualizing, in like fashion and degree with the deterioration of our taste. Our fathers and gi'andfathers of the despised mid- Victorian era were rather specially reasonable, fond of discussion and even with a leaning towards metaphysics. This last, as with the general is always the case, came in at the heels of theology. REASON 19 The theological questions which were just then upon the tapis were well within the apprehension of plain men. Carlyle had shaken his world out of a moral and intellectual torpor. The Broad Church party (Maurice, Kingsley, Robertson) arose, created as it were out of one of Carlyle's ribs while he slept ; Tennyson was an associated member of it. Browning — no one needs to be reminded how full he is of theology and of meta- physic. His voice, while it remained, was the last echo of that age. Tractarianism itself, though in essentials the party of authority, being then new and upon its trial, had to justify itself by argument ; and in Newman it jDroduced the one theologian of modern days who has made a real contribution to philosophy. Macaulay, at heart a rhetorician, yet took delight in argument of which the advocacy, the ' special pleading,' is at any rate skilfully disguised. I know that in some respects and in other intellectual fields that age suffered by its reasonableness ; it had a defect not necessary but often inherent in that good quality. It is possible, but it is not very easy to be at the same time reasonable, free-minded, elastic, unpriggish. Unpriggish our fathers were not always, even in their higher moments. Tennyson's poetry, for all its wide Yirgilian flights which are not rare, is yet throughout terribly self-conscious, tembly concerned to justify itself, and fearing the charge of extravagance with an unmanly fear. Browning, though he is of a greater nature, too great to be a prig, he too thinks too much and feels too little. An earlier poet, who had a mind capable of all things, and who, if his character and his will had consented, might have been an English Goethe — I mean Coleridge — stood along with Carlyle behind the Victorian movement toward reasonableness: and behind them both stood the great intellectual renaissance in Germany. Through Coleridge the Critical Philosophy filtered into English Victorian minds. But behind Kant in his turn had stood Newton and his Prmcipia. It was before all things the new astronomy, the wideness and exactitude of thought in the greatest geometrician the world has known, that fascinated the mind of Kant. Hume may have awakened him from his dogmatic slumber; but it was Newton who in- fused into Kant the breath of life and reason. Geometry may 2—2 20 THE PURSUIT OF REASON be reckoned a branch of metaphysics ; but it is the part which attains the most perfect form and serves as a model to the rest. This chain of influence, passing from the writing of the Principia to the growth of the Broad Church party in Victorian days, is now spent ; the very recital of those two names shows it as a diminishing power. But the Victorian age has in science produced a new world- shaking discovery which has superseded the influence on men's minds of the new astronomy from Copernicus to Newton. This is of course Darwinism and Evolution. Darwin's discovery has, even by men of science themselves, been compared to that of Newton's. A moment's consideration should show the vast difference between the two. The law of gravitation is a perfectly rigid one, capable of a rigid demon- stration. Darwin's principle is not a law at all in that sense ; it is an hypothesis, a brilliant suggestion. As an aid therefore and an incentive to Pure Reason, Darwinism can never fill the place which Newtonism once held. The demonstrations of geometry are more than the demonstrations of experiment ; they appeal to pure reason and nothing else. Darwinism is in part natural history, and so far forth not even a branch of experimental science ; while experimental science itself evokes less often pure reason {Vernunft) than simple understanding {Verst(ind). In so far as Darwinism is history it is outside of all the region of science, which must always imply ' demon- stration.' To talk of history in any possible form as a science, as some of our historical professors do, is mere confusion of words and of thought; for the post hoc of the one can never be identified with the propter hoc, which is the essence of the other. I am not forgetting that Darwin did demonstrate portions of his hypothesis in the most rigid way that was possible by experiment. Nor do I mean but that embryology when in no way historic is an exact science, But the essential of the theorem remains hypothetic. Only a portion of Darwin's thesis is demonstrable : what remains is a speculation and a suggestion of immense value, of a very high degree of plausi- bility, but which could never be satisfying to the reason in the sense that the Principia is so. Therefore to substitute the influence of Evolution for that of Newtonian Astronomy (though REASON 21 it might stimulate other faculties of the mind) must in any case have been unfavourable to reason. Unfortunately whatever evil (from the point of view of pure reason) lay in this substitution, has been increased fourfold by the actual history of the doctrine of ' Evolution,' that is to say by the quasi-accidental circumstance that it touched or was thought to touch on the ground of controversial theology. Theology, otMcial theology rose in arms. Almost from the out- set ' Darwinism ' was both attacked and defended (defended as well as attacked) in the spirit of polemics. The famous field-day betwixt Bishop Wilberforce and Huxley, which may be reckoned the first fixed engagement between Darwinism and dogmatism, is recounted in Mr Leonard Huxley's admirable Life of Huxley. But I question whether this was such a victory for science as it seemed. What after all had science, what had Huxley to do dans cette galere ? It lies outside the purpose of this treatise to apportion praise or blame on such a matter : for in this first book at least we are concerned with the choice which reason makes between truths of fact, not with the choice which the moral sense makes between truths of feeling. But for those who are inclined to weigh the delinquencies of both parties in equal scales, it is but right to point out that while to orthodoxy falls the reproach of 'you began,' the orthodox were not acting so much in violation of their principles as were the defenders of Darwinism, who defended in a polemic spirit what they should have judged only in the spirit of science. No orthodox Christian would assert or pretend that the search for truth formed the first article of his faith : though he would say that no article of his faith was inconsistent with truth. But for the man of science the first and the last of his faith should be Magna est Veritas et praevalebit. Veritas is the cardinal point of the scientist's creed: the Christian has other poles of faith. In any case, wherever we place the blame (and that is a matter of ancient history now), the effect of the false orientation of Darwinism at the outset was disastrous as time passed on. Huxley who was a philosopher not in the technical sense only, and who wrote that he did not wish his own children to accept anything on his authority merely, probably placed no 22 THE PURSUIT OF REASON high value on that victory in the Art Schools. But when he made himself the champion of Darwinism he reckoned without the foolishness of his disciples or the distorting influence of theological polemics (or anti-theological : there is no difference); in fact he did not escape that himself. What has been the result ? Darwinism has the world over been taken out of the region of science, of cold demonstration : it has become a faith, a propaganda, a new Islam. For hundreds, who have really- small touch of the scientific spirit, it has become a creed, an article of faith, a religion. Under the shadow of Evolution (first of all), and of the immense impressiveness of experimental science in her thousand achievements for a second cause, there has grown up in the course of a generation a sort of new con- fession, standing face to face with the old confessions of Pro- testantism (or Evangelicism) and Catholicism : rivalling with these or surpassing them in zeal, hardly if at all behind them in intolerance. Hordes have gone forth under the battle cry La Darwina ilia Darwin : Huxley rasoul Darwin (There is no Darwin but Darwin : Huxley is the prophet of Darwin), hordes, who had no touch of science in the whole composition of their minds, have rushed over the lands gi-asping the ' Synthetic Philosophy ' as their Koran. The new confession has gone forth conquering and to conquer, face to face with the Orthodox Church of religion. Both confessions, the Church of Science and the Church of Orthodoxy, really rest upon authority. Listen to the talk of the average 'joined member' of the scientific church, if you doubt what I say ; or read the letters which even some of its higher functionaries write to the Times when some question of a quasi- theological character comes to the fore. Do these high ec- clesiastics of the scientific church tread the humble road of demonstration ? That is not my experience. There took place some years ago a quasi-theological discussion in the Times (of all places) provoked by Lord Kelvin's assertion that all nature except the geological part of it (to put the theory in a nutshell) postulated a God. That is really a metaphysical question and outside the domain of science altogether: even fi:-om the greatest of physicists. Lord Kelvin's observation could only come as an obiter dictum. So with all the other scientists who wrote on REASON 23 the matter. Of course none of them was debarred from arguing the question on its merits. Though the notion of doing so in the columns of the Times lacked not a touch of quaintness. Is that the course they took ? Look back at the correspondence and see. Or again, try the effect of introducing the question of spiritism, even the milder telepathy, among the average members of the Church of Science. Do you once find any indication of a desire to tread the path of demonstration ? I have never met it. How may Truth, how may Right Reason, hold their own in this war of the churches ? This is something quite different from the calm philosophy begot of mathematics which came to the bedside of Kant when he awoke from his dogmatic slumber. This I account the shadow of Darwinism. And I maintain that the whole of human reason has in some measure withered beneath it. People are not perhaps less temperate than they were thirty years ago or so — about the time say that ' Essays and Reviews ' disturbed men's thoughts. They have had (it has been said) in practice to learn the lesson of live and let live. But I am sure they are less reasonable, and that they are turned more away from anything remotely resembling metaphysical enquiry, from the pursuit of pure reason in fine : and that the very standard of science has undergone a change for the worse. It has become more utilitarian, and more applied. People are impatient and suspicious of what appeals merely to the in- tellect, such as pure mathematics — of logic still more so. The fanatics of the Scientific Church confound these with meta- physics, and metaphysics they identify with theology, which is for them the Accursed Thing. Had there been none of the polemic which has arisen over ' Darwinism,' even then the doctrine of Evolution would have been not easily assimilable by the human mind : even then it would have presented many pitfalls for the human reason. In the present chapter we will speak only of these. Later in the course of our studies we shall deal with the matters of polemic : then will be the proper time to speak of the polemic use of Darwinism : now-a-days Darwinism has been put to quasi- polemic uses by all the churches, orthodox and agnostic alike 24 THE PURSUIT OF REASON Then will be the proper place to speak of the injuries Right Reason has received from all sides, as of a sudden she looked up from her books of science, surprised to find herself in the midst of contending factions. Here is the place to speak of the confusion which without 7nala fides the idea of evolution might well bring, and has certainly brought into men's thoughts. The first of these has been the confusion betwixt a ' thing ' and its origins. Evolution seems to reduce the whole world, all things knowable, to a condition of continual flux and change. The ircivra f^el of Heracleitus becomes — tends to become — the reality of realities : or as Marcus Aurelius writes : ' Some things are hurrying into existence and some are hurrying out of it ; and of that which is coming into existence, part is already extinguished. Motions and changes are con- tinually renewing the world, just as the uninterrupted course of time is always renewing the infinite duration of ages.' This seems the primary truth. And in a kind of desperate wish to get hold of something solid, folk have been ready to fix upon some sort of primal term in the long sequence of change, some supposed germ or origin, as the essence of the thing they are dealing with. In all manner of subjects this tendency has been made manifest. We know how much in political and economical disputes there has been a return to antiquarianism. We remember (for example) the importance which Freeman attached to the fact that among our Saxon fathers, kingship was half-elective : and that the Witenagemot was something quite different from our House of Lords. In disputes about land-laws, questions regarding land-tenure among the Aryans or the early Teutons, theories concerning the 7nir and the manor have assumed capital importance. So it has been with theories of the origins of our courts of law — what represented the King's Court, what the Court Baron, and so on. In the region of etymology the importance of origins has been ac- counted even greater : the etymological significance of a word being often reckoned to decide a controversy. In vain has Dr Tylor written with an ironic commonsense, ' Our under- standing of the meaning of a word is not always assisted by the knowledge that at some previous date it meant something REASON 25 different.' All these aberrations of reason were natural to men when they first absorbed the idea of evolution. But almost all have been heightened by the spirit of polemic. On the most controversial of all questions — theology or religion — the uses made of this sort of germ-theory have been at times still more fantastic : but on these I will spare to dwell in this place. We can only reflect with satisfaction that the tendency to confuse things with their origins or germs has not yet invaded the region of practical affairs. I at least have never met the man who when he had eaten a chestnut thought he had swallowed a chestnut-tree. Another among the paralogisms, the confusions of thought which have grown out of the doctrine of Evolution, reaches down much farther. To deal with it adequately would ask a treatise to itself. Moreover it would carry us deep into the cave of metaphysics : and it is the purpose of this treatise never to go farther than the mouth of that dark autre. It is part of our faith that a man may walk side by side with reason even while decided to walk always in the upper air of such ' questions ' as the general can understand : that is if he first acknowledge to his readers and to himself that there be some riddles — what we have called the paradoxes of life — which he was compelled to leave unanswered. He cannot forget the paradoxes of life altogether. Even in the upper air and in his daily walks the sphinx will from time to time rise and confront him. Then he has to confess that Reason seems to have deserted him — the gods have sent this terror upon earth. He has to pass on in silence : but anon Reason comes to his side once more. Something like this will happen in the present case : for it will be seen that the shadow of Determinism falls across our path. It was to be expected that an idea so new as Evolution and so fascinating to the imagination should in its years of novelty stretch beyond its legitimate place, should not so much be received into the reasonable world, as create a new world in which reason had to beg for a place, or to content herself like another Cinderella with whatever corner of the hearth was left for her. This image from old fairy tales is in truth a very apt 26 THE PURSUIT OF REASON one. The history of Reason has always been very like that of the modest youngest sister or despised third son of folk lore. Each new and fascinating scheme of things— Theological In- tuition, Baconian Experiment, Darwinian Evolution — each of these in turn has dressed herself for the ball of life, as if she were the elder daughter of all knowledge, and was almost ' reality ' and true knowledge personified. People are always trying to find some golden way to certainty which is not Reason : if on no other account than this that Reason quite often pro- fesses to give men not certainty, only the first among a balance of probabilities. None is more humble than she. She is no dogmatist : she tells of what she knows ; and of what she knows not she is silent^. Thus it has fillen about that for the moment Evolution — a vague sense of evolution — has in most men's thoughts quite taken the pas of sober reason : and those who boast it is to be dans le mouvement talk of their methods which have supplanted reason as being ' scientific ' ; they also on occasion recommend them to their customers — much as drapers do their wares — as being the ' latest thing out.' And then if you try and cross- question them a little and show that if their theories or their methods were followed out logically the world must fall into chaos, it is very easy for them to brush the objection aside by calling it ' metaphysics,' and by explaining to the general that we have outlived all that — nous avons change tout cela, as Moliere says. The fashions in which by means of the idea of evolution men seek to do away with or to supersede reason may be expressed in various formulas, all tending essentially to the same end. To make them as clear as I can do (in the space at our disposal) I will state them in more than one shape. For be it remembered they have not been reduced to a system or endowed with logical consistency : they constitute not a philo- sophy, but a tendency or a point of view. The central idea is to substitute some other certainty (some greater certainty if you will) for the amount of certainty which is given us in a reasoned world : it has already been said that 1 ' None is more humble tlian he [Buddha]. He tells of what he knows ; on what he knows not he is silent.' Fielding Hall. REASON 27 that is not absolute. Thousands have already thought they found that greater certainty in Determinism, though as we have shown Determinism can only be adhered to by staying the criticism of reason. Evolution presents us with necessity or determinism in a new form — the shaping of everything by its environment, the idea that everything is what it is through adaptability. Adaptability to What ? Environment. And en- vironment is what ? An infinite and unknown world. Environ- ment in its purely vague significance seems only another word for the unknown. But of course there is also the environment of experience, the soil, the air, the light which are necessary to the growth of a plant, and which vary in some degree in the case of every plant. It is very easy, and to the imagination very tempting, to generalise this thing we know into an unknown something whose existence we are conscious of but whose laws we cannot ascertain. Thus reason, it will be said by those who confuse theirs in this wise, has grown to what it is in virtue of its environment (whatever that environment may have been) ; and therefore reason is not the first guide to truth, but a conditional, a contingent guide. And the corollary is easily made that we may if we choose reject the guidance of reason herself It is really in this corollary (silently made) that the pith of the new doctrine lies. As we are not concerned with such metaphysical ideas as the Absolute, and as we decline once again to enter the hopeless territory of dispute between reason and determinism, the only matter which touches us practically is the question — Is there then something beside reason on which we can rely ? In j^ractice this new theory believes itself to have as it were a second string to its bow. What it cannot justify by reason it attempts to justify by the idea of the en- vironment or (embodying the same conception in a shape more ' questionable ') by the idea of heredity. To the raw thinker the man of plain commonsense there is not much difficulty in assimilating this idea — I say advisedly ' assimilating ' ; because he could not, nobody could work it out to a logical issue. The assimilation is the easier (to him) in that he sees no difficulty in supposing all knowledge to come from without, to be made up of impressions received from 28 THE PURSUIT OF REASON external objects, impressions working upon each other, changed by some process which he is not called on to define. But except for the plainest of plain-dealers such a theory of know- ledge is impossible to-day. What might be when Locke wrote his Essay on the Hainan Undei'standing may not be to-day, at least for whoever has absorbed only so much of the teaching of philosophy as is in the air. The man in the omnibus is more than half aware that all we can say initially of our sensational knowledge (that which comes as we deem from without) is that 'tis made up of impressions that constantly recur and in a fixed order, and that we have every reason to believe (though ' every reason to believe ' is not a strictly logical phrase) that those impressions occur in the same order to our fellow men. This much of knowledge reason makes, and must ever make, the beginning of all knowledge. Now the evolutionary idea tries to get an earlier beginning still (as we have seen) by invoking environment — a nebulous environment, and adapta- bility thereto by heredity and in other ways. But see what must be the logical outcome of this : into what chaos it must lead us so soon as this notion tries to square itself not with vague assimilation but with clear thought. For this influence of the environment can only refer to the past. And it is as logical to assume that because rouge has turned up twenty times upon the card or head upon the halfpenny, that the next toss and the next deal will give ' head ' and rouge, as it is to assume that adaptability to what has been in the past is any guarantee of suitability to what will be in the near future or even to what is in the actual present. What possible guarantee then or even suggestion of knowledge or of ' veracity ' can this theory of heredity give us ? Reasonably, if supposed adapta- bility is our assurance of truth, it is as likely as not that at this moment of time neither sun, moon, nor earth, neither hansom cabs nor my morning's breakfast exists here and now : for it is just as likely as not that the ' idea ' I have of these things is the result of heredity and nothing more : all my fellow men, having had the same environment and the same heredity, would naturally be subject to precisely the same illusion that I am subject to. REASON 29 If rouge had constantly turned up (through generations) then rouge would come to seem a necessary consequence of destiny. But directly noir turned up all the theories founded on this hereditary view of things would be falsified instan- taneously : falsified by the facts ; but hereditary adaptability would make them seem still true. And if it be said — ' We have no assurance of truth save constant sequence in the same order,' I will acknowledge that it is impossible for one to refute the assertion — at a less price, at any rate, than the retraversing all the ground passed over in the Critique of Pure Reason. But what is the use of invoking the idea of ' heredity ' to enforce a position long ago established by Hume — a position so far as regards reason of pure nihilism ? Heredity does nothing to strengthen that argument : all its power lies in confusing the issue. If things are merely what they are (or seem to be) and we know not why nor how and can never know: a shadowy environment or heredity will not enlarge our ignorance into even the semblance of knowledge. When we come to the application of this evolutionary doctrine to practical questions, we find that those who use it do in fact play fast and loose with their system. Ideas which they have no mind for they assume to be the effects of heredity only, and to have no real existence : but for ideas which they approve they tacitly assume that these have by adaptability to the past environment been made the most fitting for the present. Thus travelling round a circle of the narrowest diameter they are always constant to their opinions : these are true because they are adapted to their environment, and they are adapted to their environment because they are true\ ' Mr Herbert Spencer will deserve everlasting remembrance as the first to seize and assimilate the full import to philosophy of Evolution, one may say indeed Hibeniice, and more than the full import. In revenge, he has fallen as deep as anyone into the pitfalls which this notion (Evolution) digs for the unwary, and which it has been the purpose of the foregoing pages to suggest. Never perhaps in the history of philosophy, never certainly since abstract thought freed itself from the trammels of theology, has a more extraordinary passage been written by a thinker than one to be found in the second volume of Spencer's Principles of Psychology. Spencer has there been encountered by the very ditliculty we speak of, the prime difficulty of the sceptical philosophy, that seemingly (in Hume's phrase) 'Nature by an absolute and uncontrollable neces- sity has determined us to judge ' that to be true wliich we have no rational grounds for concluding to be true. It is obvious how pat the idea of evolution^ 30 THE PURSUIT OF REASON If we step for a moment into more philosophical regions, we may express in another fashion the confusion of thought caused by what I have named the assimilation as distinguished from with its attendant heredity and so fortli, fits in with and seems to justify this Conclusion of Hume's. Nevertheless the conclusion means chaos — as we have already shown. Kant had to write the Kritik to build ujd the world again, and restore to Keason her own. With a naivity which is not without its charm Spencer ignores alike Kant and the gravity of the problem he has set himself to solve; and disposes of the matter in a sentence. All the difficulty he finds is how have metaphysicians got themselves into such a muddle? ' The answer to this question is ' (our author says) ' that metaphysicians greatly over-vahie a particular mode of mental action. They tacitly assume the supreme authority of certain highest and most recently developed powers, which have been the leaders of immense conquests: and they act as though this supremacy was unconditional. Through Reasoning multitudes of marvellous results have been reached, and Reasoning has come to excite an amount of faith greatly in excess of that which is its due.' Psychology, Vol. ii. p. 313 (stereot. ed.). This 'reasoning- is of course nothing else but Reason {die reine Vernunft) •with all her claims. Having dismissed those claims in the manner we see, by & stroke of the pen, Mr Spencer leaves the direct answer to the question before him and passes on to other examples of people being unduly impressed by, to use his words, ' the proximate causes of imposing effects,' as for instance by the authority of print ; as when people urge as a proof of their assertion that they ' saw it in print.' Another instance is the exaggerated expectations which some people entertain of the results of book education. Reason in other words 'butters no parsnips.' But is it not a little strange in a book which bears the title 'A system of Synthetic Philosophy' to find reason treated in so cavalier a fashion? One supposed that 'philosophy' meant, rightly speaking, a search for truth, not an enquii-y how parsnips came to be buttered, or in a general way how things came about ; and reason is ■concerned with just this matter, truth. Not only is Mr Spencer seemingly unconscious of the vastness of the problem to be solved, but he is unaware how little reason there is in his own manner of solving it. The following sentence (which follows very close on the one just quoted) is very noticeable both as illustrating the degree in which Mr Spencer is evidently satisfied with his previous argument and the methods by which he seeks to build up conviction of its finality in his own mind and in the mind of his reader. ' The remarkable fact is ' (our author goes on) ' that this excessive confidence in Reason ' [let us note with satisfaction that Reasoning has now become, what it ought to have been at the first. Reason] ' as compared with simpler modes of intellectual action, is not seen in those by whom Reason has been employed with sucli astonishing results. Men of science now, as in all past times, subordinate the deliverances of conscience reached through mediate processes, to the deliverances of conscience reached through immediate processes: or to speak strictly, they subordinate those deliverances reached through long and conscious reasoning, to those deliverances reached through reasoning which has become so nearly automatic as no longer to be called reasoning. The astronomer who has, through the elaborate quantitative reasonings which we call calculations, concluded that a transit of Venus will commence upon a REASON 31 the reasonable acceptance of Evolution. The head of offence (to reason), the confusion of confusions, consists in this, that the new doctrine takes succession in time for the essential reality. But if the world is reasonable at all it is succession in reason which is the essential reality — the a -priori of logic not the a priori of time. All the history of much-despised philosophy may be summed up as the endeavour to realise that first in reason and first in time are two {irporepa h" iarl kuI yvwfie- ponrepa St%&)9, as Aristotle says), to correct the natural impulse induced by practical life to assume the d priori of time as the all-in-all. And the simplest form of the process of philosophy (or reason) is the correction of the post hoc ergo propter hoc of the savage. Hume himself only repeats the error of the savage in a philosophical guise : and the unreasonable philosophy of evolutionism which we are combating is but Hume's theoiy of knowledge re-written in other words. The effect of our momentary evolution-on-the-brain then has been to unravel so far forth all the skein which reason certain day, hour and minute, and who, on turning a telescope to the Sun at that time, sees no black spot entering upon its disc, infers an untruth in his calculations, not an untruth in those relatively brief and primitive acts of thought which go to make up his observation.' [There follows another illus- tration drawn from the action of a chemist in an analogous difficulty, and Mr Spencer concludes] ' So it is with all classes of those men whose joint efforts have brought our knowledge of the Universe to its present comprehensive state. It is rather among the spectators of these vast achievements of Reason that we find this exaggerated estimate of its power.' Here of course mere experiment and the 'Understanding' (Verstand) which is sufficient for experiment is put in the place of Reason. But even as a vindi- cation of Understanding the above example is fallacious. For the argument carries its author much farther (in principle) than he would dream of going. The last-quoted sentence is only a rather pompous way of describing a pro- cedure which may just as well be Hodge's at a conjuring exhibition. If Hodge leaves the performance firmly persuaded that the conjurer really did produce from his inside three hundred yards of tape, a pound of feathers, and a glass bowl of fish, then the mediate process of consciousness which we should call Hudge's Commonsense but which in this case is really Reason, neither more nor less, tells him tbat the thing was impossible : but the immediate process of consciousness tells him that the thing was done. So, likewise, to everyone from the savage to the astronomer the immediate process of consciousness proclaims that the sun goes round the earth, it is only the mediate process which tells the last that this apparent motion of the sun comes from the rotation of our planet. In a word, if Mr Spencer after slighting reason, had not given his own a rest for the time being, he could not have failed to see, before he got to this point, in what a quandary he was like to be left. 32 THE PURSUIT OF REASON (and science too) have woven since the beginning of time. It is true that reason in certain moods has already performed this feat unaided : reason does as much unaided when she is caught in one of her paradoxes, as she is caught in the paradox of determinism. It was in fact nothing else but determinism in a new sense that Hume demonstrated when he showed that cause and effect were nothing more than a sequence of events — of phenomena. To prove that was in fact to prove by reason that there was no reason : for at the root of all reason lies the idea of cause. But what Hume showed only for the metaphysician, evolution, the hypnotism of evolution, has forced upon the minds of the vulgar — Hume whispered it in the chamber, Neo- Darwinism has proclaimed it from the housetops. For the reasoner — I mean for him who thinks that knowledge begins in reason — time is only a necessary form of thought : but for the evolutionist reason becomes not even a necessary (there is no ' necessary ' when reason is dethroned) but an accidental birth of time. It is not possible here to do more than indicate these tendencies, not possible to follow out the questions they raise. One must leave it homini bonae voluntatis, to the man of good will, to trace the links in the chain of logic which united idea to idea. By the ' man of good will ' I mean him who loves reason, and desires before all things to come by reason at the truth. But he who is malae voluntatis in this matter and hates to exert this faculty of his mind, will perforce remain under the hjrpnotism of evolution; for that asks no hard thinking, only the pleasant resting under the shadow of a single idea. The man of good will will easily see how naturally or inevitably this illogical corollary of evolution— the stepping backward in the search for a reasoned world — follows upon the difference which was dwelt on a page or two back between the intellectual value of Newtonism and Darwinism. Darwinism, it was pointed out, is in great part only Natural History : and in history there can be no strict logic ; there can never be more than the post hoc, never the propter hoc of rigid demonstration. It is by elbowing out the idea of the propter hoc that Darwinism misapplied can make reason itself only an accident of time. REASON 83 No scientific discovery, no theory of science can in reality be superior to reason or a substitute therefor: because, in the making of the discovery or of the theory, reason was tacitly assumed as the all-sufficient guide. Both in mental science — theory of reason, and in moral science — theory of morals, the notion of heredity is used to-day as a substitute for reason. In mental science reason is discredited as metaphysics : and a vague hope is entertained and half-expressed that by a collec- tion of facts or of experiments we shall get rid of the necessity of reasoning upon them, that they will assort themselves by some internal crystalline process. So there arises on this side a school which seeks to substitute Psychology for metaphysics. On the moral side the new influence, this tendency of thought (for one cannot call it a system), has hit upon the notion of testing reason not by reason, but by practice : a notion which has received in England and America the name of Pragmatism, and of which we shall speak later and more fully. To sum up then. Though we have so far been able only to glance at this second produce of Neo-Darwinism and evolution mis-understood — the substitution of the first in time for the first in reason — yet the man of good will to reflect and to guard his mind from being caught by catch-words will I deem see at the root of all these methods the same fundamental error. It is the error of not seeing or forgetting that the validity of reason is first assumed in these theories in order that that validity may be called in question : that that which we call experiment, experience, or what not, has been already selected as such by the reason. Utilitarianism must stand or fall as it is, by its relation to reason as it is ; to try and find another sanction for it through heredity : that notion too is but confusion of thought. On these matters I deem the man who loves reflection will satisfy himself by reflection. But for our purpose it is not possible to do more than suggest on what lines his thoughts should run. K. R. CHAPTER II. THOUGHT AND SPEECH. Men we may guess will never cease from speculation con- cerning the origin of language. Yet there are some questions connected with it on which their guesses seem destined to be for ever vain. Of such is the debate whether speech was at its outset rather emotional or rather descriptive, that is to say intellectual : whether it began in (say) a series of cries or of imitative sounds. Questions less elemental than these, questions which were once presented to us as settled, are I believe no longer reckoned so ; such as the evolution of speech from the monosyllabic to the agglutinative stage, and then to the inflected. That schema which Max Miiller formerly set forth with so much clearness and fascination, has, unless I am mistaken, gone by the board. On the other hand, there are some facts of the history of language which it seems hardly possible to doubt ; they seem to follow from the very nature of human speech, and they are, too, pointed at by all the a posteriori circumstances that come within our knowledge, by a chain of reasoning in fact of which the least experienced can appreciate the force. Among such facts of the history of speech one is for the purposes of our enquiry and for the history of human reason of capital import- ance. It is this : that the words of earliest currency among men must have dealt almost exclusively with external ' ideas ' and with impressions from without, leaving the internal ' ideas,' the thoughts and feelings, upon one side. I say the words of earliest ' currency.' Currency is of the essence of language. It is currency which distinguishes lan- guage, properly so called, from those mere utterances which might have been evoked by momentary inward feelings, by pains or by emotions, and which may have constituted not THOUGHT AND SPEECH 35 language but the germ or say the raw material of speech. The true currency of language is of another sort. In a general way, that a word may gain this cun-ency these conditions must be satisfied : it must express something which is in the minds of two people (two at least) at the same time ; and at the same moment be known by A to be in the mind of B, and by B to be in the mind of A. Now the chances of this happening in the case of impressions coming from without, is obviously a hundred- fold greater than the chance of this happening with thoughts or feelings which spring from within. Even if the word when first used expressed rather a feeling than an impression, that it should be sudden and simultaneous (the conditions for its gaining currency, coming into use) it must have been caused by some object. And very soon it would become the name of the thing, not of the feeling which the thing first called forth. I take an imaginary illustration. Suppose in some remote ancestral settlement a child is carried off before the eyes of its parents by a cave-hyaena or a cave-bear ; and that the horror of the sight evokes from these parents a cry which be- comes in time the name given to the creature. In order that the cry may become a ' word ' it must be evoked by the sight of a second cave-bear ; and the bystanders must perceive the thing which evoked the cry, though they do not share the emotion out of which the cry arose. Even in the case of uttering cries during some common action, analogous to the yo-ho of sailors hauling at a rope (and some people have guessed the origin of speech to lie there), this cry when it has become a word will, it is a hundred to one, be used either for that particular action alone, and that means for something external ; or — more prob- ably — it will be applied to the thing on which the action has been expended. In either case it will have an outward, or impressional significance, not an inward one of thoughts or feelings. Such a priori considerations would be enough to convince us that language began in impressions. All the facts of language point the same way. In every language a great majority of the words which express the inward parts of man express the out- ward also : if they stand for thoughts and feelings, they stand for sensations and impressions as well. Our word ' feeling ' is 3—2 36 THE PURSUIT OF REASON an excellent instance to the point. And when this is the case who can doubt that the physical significance was the earlier ? In languages with a history we have another sort of words also ; those which in a later condition (in the more modern language) express thoughts or feelings only, but that in the parent tongue have a physical significance. How many of the words we have been using in the foregoing sentences are of this order ! ' Ex- press ' for example from the Latin exprimere to press out or to mark by outward pressure. ' Feeling ' we have dealt with. ' Idea ' is the thing seen ; ' thought,' ' think ' are etymologically connected simply with * thing,' and both ' think ' and ' thing ' are according to Fick {Vergleichendes WorterbucJi der Itido-Ger- manisch. Sp?:) derived from a root tak signifying ' to fit.' This is almost identical with the etymological meaning of ' reason ' (I'atio) ' counted thing.' In all languages ' spirit does but mean the breath ' — etymo- logically. ' Ghost ' is connected with the German gdlinen, to breathe heavily, to yawn. The Greek yfrvxv> spirit, has a similar meaning ('\jrvx<^> to breathe) and 6vfi6<; is connected with a Sanskrit root dhuma, smoke. Our 'grief is from the Latin gravis, ' heavy ' — a thing heavy to bear : but ' sorrow ' is a Teu- tonic word, allied to ' sore,' a wound. ' Attention ' is fi-om the Latin tendere, to stretch — a stretching of the thoughts. Of such again is the Greek fiavdavay, ' to learn,' ' to understand,' which the philologists say is allied to the Sanskrit ind, to measure : and the Latin ratio our ' reason ' has, we saw, an origin of the same kind. We see the first physical significance of our ' right ' and the Latin rectus (' straight ' as well as right ') in porrectus, stretched out. For of course ' straight ' is but ' stretched,' the stretched string being the straight string. The Greek ^poveco, ' to consider' and (f)p6ur}(Ti<;, 'judgment,' are from (f>pi]v, which means the region — maybe the muscles or skin — about the heart. For etymologically ^prjv is connected with Bid4>pay/xa, diaphragm. Obviously words of this class which have passed from a physical to an intellectual meaning are better evidence of the physical origin of the words even than those which retain to-day a double sense. I have seen it stated that while the substantives of language (of all languages) point to a physical origin for their meanings. THOUGHT AND SPEECH 37 the verbs do not so. I know not by what evidence this theory can be supported. The instances of navOdvw, of ^povew, and of ' think,' given above are conspicuous ones to the contrary. The Latin amare is the source of the substantive amor and itself has a purely physical sense, as it is etymologically allied to the Greek cifMo, and the German sammt, and of course our ' same ' : only that has lost its earlier meaning. But such a physical origin in the case of amare we should expect. ' Hate ' is from the same root as ' hunt.' Here however it is difficult to be sure which verb was the earlier. Our ' observe ' means to keep before the eyes : ' observe ' itself obviously implies a physical act ; and ' maintain ' is to hold with the hands. To ' ponder ' is to weigh, and to ' consider ' is to observe the stars. These a posteriori proofs which might be taken from any language and multiplied indefinitely bring us a step farther than our a priori argument did ; insomuch as they show, not alone that words with a physical meaning preceded in the history of speech those with an internal or as we may say meta- physical meaning, but that the physical words did in fact exhaust (or nearly so) man's vocabulary of sound, fill up the gamut of his word-making faculty. So that as a fact the words for thoughts or feelings have (like the word 'feeling' itself) been transplanted from the sensuous domain to the non-sensuous: almost all have had at one time a double meaning, one directly physical the other symbolically metaphysical. Certain words (like our ' grief,' ' sorrow ') have dropped the physical meaning : all or almost all must for a longer or a shorter period have 'paltered in a double sense ' to the no small confusion of men's thought. What was weighty became also what weighed upon one's spirit : the stretched string became symbolical of the strained atten- tion. As with us ' heart,' ' brain * are now parts of a man's body, and now parts (so to say) of his soul. This last process of transfer by symbolism though it has taken place need not in the eternal nature of things have done so. Obviously men began with but a vague notion of their thoughts and feelings and mixed them up with their sensations. And as a fact the stage in a people's intellectual advance is fairly well indicated by the proportion which their metaphysical 38~ THE PURSUIT OF REASON words bear to their physical. But it need not have been in the nature of things that when men grew conscious of their internal ideas, they could not find appropriate sounds to express them. The clarity of our thought would have gained greatly if such had been the case. Man's power of varying sounds, however, falls vastly short of all his varied experiences: one might anticipate that it would do : and the result has been that long before he came to express or express with any amplitude his thoughts and feelings, his vocabulary was exhausted, and he had to speak in the symbolic fashion that we know. This is, I am aware, a crude and too trenchant way of putting the case. The influence of words on thoughts, of speech on thought, is too great and too subtle to be disposed of in a sentence. And it follows that if man expressed his inward world symbolically from his outward world, he thought of the two as blended together. But on the whole we are justified in looking upon the effect, this confusion of thoughts with impressions, rather as a by-result of the history of language than a necessary result in the history of thought. What from the foregoing enquiry ensues as to the relation of the two orders of ' ideas,' the physical and metaphysical, with us here and now, is as follows. In the first place the primal cause why men began their speech with impressions and not thoughts (with things seen, not things thought) holds equally to-day : the things seen can be known by A to be in the mind of B and by B to be in the mind of A at the same moment. So that every time a word is used which belongs to this category it can be (as it were) corrected — brought back from any deviation to render the exact idea: therefore, apart from all history of language, the words for physical ideas must always be more exact than for metaphysical. But the actual history of words has done much to emphasize this difference. The much longer currency in language which the physical words have had than the metaphysical would add immensely to their clarity and serviceableness. Lastly the fact (quasi-accidental) that the second class of words have for a long period been used only symbolically, this would involve a vast confusion of thought and still farther postpone their power of conveying clear ideas on this class of experiences — the internal. THOUGHT AND SPEECH 39 It will be said that we have undertaken a long demonstra- tion to arrive at a very obvious result ; and that no one doubts the greater clearness of our physical as compared to our meta- physical ideas. This (it will be said) is no more than the drawing once again the distinction which Herbert Spencer draws between ' vivid ' and ' faint ' manifestations ; on which distinction rests in effect the whole of his synthetic philosophy. But my subject is very different. I am not discussing the ideas themselves, but the expression of them. In its crudity that distinction of Spencer's between ' vivid ' and ' faint ' cannot, I hold, be maintained, least of all as a substitute for the old philosophical terms the ' ego ' and the ' non-ego.' There must be some of the metaphysical ideas which, because they are always with us, we are really more conscious of than of any ' phenomenal ' ideas. And it is in fact these inseparable ones that constitute the ' ego ' of philosophy, not the mere current of faint ideas. There is besides the further fact that what we take for individual experiences are nine times in ten rather calls upon the memory than actual sensations. (M. Bergson I think has shown this more clearly than anyone before in his Matiere et Memoire.) Therefore any actual distinction of the two categories of ideas — a distinction which applies to all the members of each — must be dismissed. What our demonstration results in is some- thing quite different — no more than the vastly greater facility we have in expressing, or in conveying from one to the other, the ideas of sensation. This facility of transfer derives not from something essential in the thoughts themselves, but chiefly from the necessities of speech : and in a philosophical sense this is an accidental cause. It is not wholly but more through the habit of language than necessity of thought that, when we get to the region of thoughts and feelings, we seem to float among vague and shifting notions in marked contrast with the exactitude of our sensations. For one thing, the sensations themselves are not so uniform as we suppose them. There is probably an immense difference among men in their appreciations of colour in its finer shades. For of course the spectrum runs through an indefinite number of shades ; and it is only by the accident of language that a few of these have received names. There is no possibility of testing 40 THE PURSUIT OF REASON appreciation of colour by speech : but we can test it to some extent by the sensitiveness which men have in jfront of a scene or a picture. In the appreciation of the shades of sound there is a still greater difference between one man and another. There is, I say, no demonstrative fashion of testing these things ; be- cause our seeming uniformity of impression springs from the fact that we do not even give names to the impressions them- selves, but to the objects which call them forth. Moreover it is to be remembered that the essential difference between one man and another before a picture or in a concert-room is a difference not only in perception of colours and sounds but in the pleasure given by colours and sounds. The real feelings for which in such a case we want names, but have them not, are feelings of pleasure. We are better supplied with names for feelings of pain than for feelings of pleasure. And the former are sometimes independent of the object which causes them. Thus we talk of a wound 'burning,' as we might talk of the touch of hot iron. But, though we are quite conscious of the different kinds of pleasure to the palate which we get from say a pheasant or a strawberry ice, we have no other names for the feelings of pleasure in taste as such, except the vague words sweet and savoury. And when we get to the pleasures of other organs, the eye or the ear, or the nose, we have no sort of names for them, save the names of the objects which cause them. Could dogs have speech, doubt it not, smells would have individual names with them and so become ' things.' Once again, language makes no allowances for differences between high developments and lower : language is essentially democratic. Its ' currency ' obliges it to be this. ' For it is by discourse that men associate, and words are disposed according to the apprehension of the vulgar^.' So that on the whole the reason why the ideas of sensation are clearer than the ideas of thought and emotion lies much more in the history of language than in the necessities of human nature. There is no reason in itself why people of a certain development and sensibility should not have a common language for ideas which they share, but are not shared by the general : and this in the region of sensation itself. In such a condition of things ^ Novum Organum, tr. THOUGHT AND SPEECH 41 artists (say) would be able to talk their pictures. They might express in words what in fact they say in paint. But the actual history of language in fact forbids this^. I have insisted almost at undue length on this point. For the difficulty is not to realise that the peculiar clearness be- longing to our language of sensation has a quasi-accidental origin ; but to bear the fact in mind. It is lapse of memory which creates the greatest barrier against the understanding of the relations of thought to speech and speech to thought. The moment we cease to be reminded that words and thoughts are not identical, we identify them : and out of this confusion have sprung most of men's errors from the path of right reason. It is not necessary that the utterance should be a verbal one, for this habit of thought, this dependence on the utterance, to arise. The same habit which causes us to think that the named colours of the spectrum are more real than the shades (we hardly call them colours) which lie between, will make the violin-player himself consider the tones and semitones given by notation more real than the nuances which his strings give in passing from one to another. The musical critic, whose ear perhaps has been less trained than his fluency of speech, will be still more apt to think after this manner. Yet on the well- played string there need be no passage per saltum. And this is demonstrated by the fact that the well-trained ear can dis- tinguish shades of vibration from the violin-strings which the strings themselves cannot produce or have not produced 2. The tendency of the fluent musical critic will be that of the fluent \vriter and ready speaker everywhere. Words for such an one will always tend to identify themselves with ideas. He will find it more difficult than would another to accept the arguments of the foregoing pages and of those which follow. Taking it however as established that, owing essentially to the history of language, the names for impressions of the senses and for objects of sense are indefinitely more exact than any other class of words, this corollary immediately follows : That 1 What is precisely the relation of poetry to ordinary speech is discussed elsewhere (Book 11. Ch. xii.). 2 I have been unable to find again the reference to this fact in Professor James' Psyclioloijy. 42 THE PURSUIT OF REASON propositions touching these external experiences are more demonstrable, or more easily demonstrable, than propositions concerning things of the mind. In a word, that the whole province of natural science is more demonstrable than the province of what used to be called mental science, that is to say metaphysics and its allied studies. It is hardly worth while to labour this point, seeing that the greater demonstrability of science over metaphysics has been made the theme of con- tinual discourse in works of a professedly philosophical kind, by men of science or trained in scientific thought ; and in those semi-philosophical prefaces which men of science often prefix to their scientific treatises; and in lectures, from those at the Royal Institution down to those at what village institute you will. The clarity and the advance of science are for ever contrasted with the static obscurity of metaphysics : and this I say is a theme of universal discourse. So much has it prevailed, that metaphysics itself has grown ashamed and been fain at least to drop its dishonoured name and appear more vaguely as ' philosophy,' or half scientifically as ' the theory of knowledge ' (Epistemology). What, however, it is needful to insist on is that this clarity, this demonstrability of science is the result — as we have seen — partly of accident, and is not necessary to the constitution of the human mind. It is of yet greater consequence to realise — that which indeed is the foundation of one half of all that is to follow in this treatise of reason — that what the history of language (or of thought so far as that has been moulded by language) has conferred on science has not been more of reasonableness and nearer approach to truth, but more of demonstrability than belongs to studies of mind. It is indeed of capital importance that the distinction between reason and demonstrability should stand clearly in men's thoughts. Substantially this distinction between reason and demon- stration has often been recognised by metaphysicians, as by Aristotle when he writes : ' Science implies demonstration. But things whose principles or causes are variable do not admit of demonstration ; for every- thing which depends on these principles or causes is itself THOUGHT AND SPEECH 43 variable.... It follows then that judgment {<^p6v'q(Ti